by Jack Lee
Candidate for Governor, billionaire and former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman-R, came to Chico today and spoke at the Holiday Inn to an audience of about 150 mostly conservative Republicans. She received a friendly welcome and the gathering listened to her pitch politely, but with some reservation.
Mrs. Whitman opened with, ”Why would anybody want to be Governor of an insolvent state with all its troubles?” She noted that unemployment is creeping up on 12 percent and a K-12 education system now ranks a dismal 48th out of 50 states.
Whitman is a mostly moderate Republican when it comes to social issues. She is pro-choice, but she said she voted in favor of Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification if the girl was under 16. The initiative failed.
She is also for gun restriction in California. She said she supports Second Amendment rights, but that an assault weapon ban and handgun restrictions are “probably the right thing in California.” She does not own a gun and was never a hunter.
These two issues don’t go over well in Chico, unless you are a Democrat. Another issue that might give California Republicans some pause, is her take on selling oil leases for revenue. At the current time she is mostly against off shore drilling, but said she would reconsider if new technology made drilling more environmentally safer.
A reporter recently asked if she would favor cutting benefits such as welfare or health care to illegal immigrants, Whitman said that although border enforcement is important she would not support such cuts, because “whether they’re legal or illegal (immigrants), those benefits go to children … and we have to protect the children.” Seems like we have heard that somewhere before, oh yeah, Democrats use it to bully Republicans and get their way.
On the positive side Whitman said she would focus on three main areas, jobs, education and spending cuts. Unfortunately, this is not very original. Almost everybody running says they will increase the job market (It’s just another version of a chicken in every pot line). Despite the recession and all kinds of private business layoffs, somehow California has managed to add an additional 6,000 new hires in the last year, bringing the state employee level to over 345,000. Whitman says she would trim this number by 10%. A good start if she can do it, but then she’s never had to go head to head with powerful labor unions.
As for the school system, the test scores began dropping almost directly proportunate to the numbers of illegals floodiing the system. The more we got, the worse the test scores got. You have to remember we don’t have PHD’s sneaking across the border, we have the poorest of the poor and the worst educated. We can’t just immediately turn them around and make them into college bound students, it’s going to take some time and no amount of money spent on teachers or schools is going immediately correct this problem.
Mrs. Whitman is a close ally of both Mitt Romney and John McCain. However, neither of these men have a lot of political clout in California. McCain wasn’t considered conservative enough to warrant much state GOP support.
Whitman has a reputation as something of a financial whiz kid, having been with eBay for the last 10 years on their way to stardom as one of the top 10 retailers in the USA, at least based on their volume.
However, this reputation may be bigger than life because the new CEO has scrapped almost all of Whitman’s old ideas. The only one he liked was buying PayPal, which eBay could have avoided if they had gotten to market more quickly with their own credit card payment system. That long delay cost them hundreds of millions.
According to a New York Times article, CEO Donahoe is also “undoing her questionable acquisitions of Skype and StumbleUpon. It turns out that neither voice communications nor Web surfing have anything to do with what eBay does. More subtly, but maybe more important, Mr. Donahoe is backing off from Ms. Whitman’s initiative to take on Amazon.com.”
Maybe Whitman didn’t go over like a skyrocket in Chico, but then again her stump speech is playing to a more liberal stage. Which is why I believe her message and ideas will likely sell better the further south she goes…and that’s where the votes are anyway. Up this way we’re just along for the ride and we’re going whatever way SoCal wants us to go. That’s just reality.